Is there an underground, countercultural scene in today's cinema? Something like the movies of Andy Warhol called Flesh and Trash, or the beatnik experimentalism from which David Niven famously recoiled in his 1972 autobiography The Moon's a Balloon? In a sense, the question was rendered irrelevant on 23 April 2005, when the first film was uploaded to YouTube. Now there is an unimaginably vast ocean of unlicensed, free movie-making. The underground is the web. But like the Wombles, it's underground, overground. It's there for all to see.

Now there is a (relatively) new site, Vimeo, which does not accept clips taken from film or TV, and showcases seriously impressive work, which is seen by far more people than would ever experience it within the conventional model of cinema distribution or TV broadcast.

The question of "underground" cinema goes further than this: the sites which show pirated movies – camcorded at cinemas and uploaded to the web – are a flourishing, authentically underground phenomenon in that they are unlawful. They are forever being shut down, and other sites spring up. There are other, more high-minded sites, showing rare arthouse movies. I was told of a site run by a Spanish blogger that allows you to watch fascinating items on streaming video like Marcel Carné's 20-minute documentary Nogent, Eldorado du Dimanche (1929) – which certainly isn't available on DVD. The site's existence was whispered to me: it wasn't clear if accessing it was legally naughty. That really is underground.

Arguably, there has been, in the last decade, an underground cinema dimension to the anti-war movement in the US; finding that documentaries criticising the Iraq war had no chance of getting shown in cinemas or on television, community groups would purchase the DVD, and advertise one-off showings linked to activist discussions. The Chicago critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has highlighted the work of the micro-distribution company Extreme Low Frequency run by the director Travis Wilkerson, a "third cinema" activist group which showcases the work of independent film-makers in this kind of community forum.

The web changed the game as far as "underground" cinema goes: it is out there, hidden, perhaps, in plain sight.